“I knew it!” I said.  “Horace, you’re a dreamer, too.  You are dreaming of peace and comfort in your old age, a little quiet house in town where you won’t have to labour as hard as you do now, where you won’t be worried by crops and weather, and where Mrs. Horace will be able to rest after so many years of care and work and sorrow—­a kind of earthly heaven!  And you are dreaming of leaving a bit to your children and grandchildren, and dreaming of the gratitude they will express.  All dreams, Horace!”

“Oh, waal—–­”

“The fact is, you are working for a dream, and living on dreams—­isn’t that true?”

“Waal, now, if you mean it that way——­”

“I see I haven’t got you beaten yet, Horace!”

He smiled broadly,

“We are all amiable enough with our own dreams.  You think that what you are working for—­your dream—­is somehow sounder and more practical than what I am working for.”

Horace started to reply, but had scarcely debouched from his trenches when I opened on him with one of my twenty-fours.

“How do you know that you are ever going to be old?”

It hit.

“And if you do grow old, how do you know that thirty thousand dollars—­oh, we’ll call it that—­is really enough, provided you don’t lose it before, to buy peace and comfort for you, or that what you leave your children will make either you or them any happier?  Peace and comfort and happiness are terribly expensive, Horace—­and prices have been going up fast since this war began!”

Horace looked at me uncomfortably, as men do in the world when you shake the foundations of the tabernacle.  I have thought since that I probably pressed him too far; but these things go deep with me.

“No, Horace,” I said, “you are the dreamer—­and the impractical dreamer at that!”

For a moment Horace answered nothing; and we both stood still there in the soft morning sunshine with the peaceful fields and woods all about us, two human atoms struggling hotly with questions too large for us.  The cow and the new calf were long out of sight.  Horace made a motion as if to follow them up the lane, but I held him with my glittering eye—­as I think of it since, not without a kind of amusement at my own seriousness.

“I’m the practical man, Horace, for I want my peace now, and my happiness now, and my God now.  I can’t wait.  My barns may burn or my cattle die, or the solid bank where I keep my deferred joy may fail, or I myself by to-morrow be no longer here.”

So powerfully and vividly did this thought take possession of me that I cannot now remember to have said a decent good-bye to Horace (never mind, he knows me!).  At least when I was halfway up the hill I found myself gesticulating with one clenched fist and saying to myself with a kind of passion:  “Why wait to be peaceful?  Why not he peaceful now?  Why not be happy now?  Why not be rich now?”

For I think it truth that a life uncommanded now is uncommanded; a life unenjoyed now is unenjoyed; a life not lived wisely now is not lived wisely:  for the past is gone and no one knows the future.